by Milly Taiden
Knox pulled out his phone and sent Shani a text. He wanted to make sure someone let him know when Scarlett showed up. And if she was okay.
He marched toward the front of the house when he saw someone being dragged into the trees near his house. He rushed forward, glancing around to see if any of the security he hired were back. None of them were around. Waiting might be wisest, but he didn’t want to take chances. What if someone needed help?
He rushed into the woods, trying to hear for the couple he’d seen. Leaves crunched under the pressure of his boots. He should’ve grabbed a jacket before coming out. It was nippy.
“Let me go!”
The sound was faint, but he ran toward it. The woman’s voice sounded panicked and scared.
“You’re coming with me, princess.”
“I said let go!”
Knox ran faster toward the voices until they got closer and closer. He passed a tree and came up on a man dragging a woman he knew all too well.
“Lisa?” So she had shown up, even after he’d told her he couldn’t date her any longer but would be happy to keep her father on as a client.
Lisa turned to him, her eyes filled with horror. “Knox, get help. I don’t want to be some guy’s play thing.”
The guy was big with large muscles and a bald head. He laughed at Knox. “Get the hell out of here before you get your face damaged.”
“You heard him. Get out of here, puny human,” said a voice behind Knox.
“Maybe he wants to play,” a third guy said. He was the biggest with a long scar on the side of his face from left eye to upper lip.
The other two guys closed in on him. He pressed the number one button on his cell phone that should bring him immediate help. His guards would be there soon.
Scar face marched over to Lisa and squeezed her face in his hands. “You’ll be mine tonight.”
“Get away from me!” she screeched. “I’m not interested in being your anything.”
Knox took three steps forward, but scar face turned golden eyes at him. “The human doesn’t get it. I think he has a death wish.”
“Leave her alone,” he said and pressed the button on his phone again. Where the fuck were the guards?
“I think you’re right, Mike,” the guy who had Lisa let go and came around to Knox’s side. “He does have a death wish.”
Scar face yanked Lisa into his arms, his fingers digging into her side as he ignored her struggles and kissed her.
She screamed for Knox. He should have waited. He knew that. But instinct won out and the need to protect was one he couldn’t fight. He tried to run to the guy, but the two guys grabbed him. They dragged him forward to the scar man.
His features changed, face elongating and hands turning into claws. “Then death it shall be.”
It took Knox a second to realize what he was saying. By the time he did, the guy was tearing up his chest with a single swing of his claws. Knox glanced down. Blood seeped from his chest wounds. He didn’t feel pain. Heat centered at his chest.
The other two let him go. He took the last few steps in a hurry and tried to pull Lisa out of the guy’s grasp. He dug his claws into Knox’s shoulder and yanked hard, stripping the arm to near bone.
He fell to the ground. Pain radiated in his chest. He couldn’t feel his arm. Lisa and the man grabbing her turned fuzzy in his view. His glasses were gone. “Lisa…”
“Knox, don’t die. I need you to help me!”
Knox opened his mouth to say something, but his tongue felt heavy. He couldn’t speak. His vision tunneled, black closing in from the edges. He wanted to apologize to her that this happened at his party. The last thing he saw before everything turned dark was Lisa spitting on scar guy and him lifting a clawed hand and going for her face.
EIGHT
Scarlett ran into the bedroom where they had Knox in the mansion. Her stomach was going to toss out everything she ate the day before. Seeing as she hadn’t a thing right before Knox’s party and definitely nothing right after, she didn’t think she’d vomit much. Nick had called her as he headed for the mansion when Knox was found. She’d hauled ass and got there as quickly as she could, not twenty minutes after the call.
“Nick,” she said hastily in the bedroom.
A piercing scream from the bed made her stop and wince. Knox was chained with huge links to the wall behind the headboard. She tried to run to him, but Nick grasped her arm and stopped her.
“He’s transitioning.”
“Into what?”
“Wolf,” Nick said. “I hope he is, anyway.”
She met his gaze, her heart thumping so hard, she could barely hear anything else. “What happened? Who did this?”
Nick shook his head. “I don’t know. My men didn’t scent anyone in the area. They found him like this. Dying.”
“Alone?” She gulped and took a step toward the bed, her gut clenching with fear.
“We scented a female, but there was no sign of her in the area,” one of the guards said.
She watched Knox thrash, his face pale, and his chest and arm covered in blood. “There has to be something we can do.” She turned to Nick. “Do something!”
Nick pressed his lips together. “What do you want me to do, Scarlett? He’s past what I can do for him. Even if I bit him now, there’s no chance he’d take a lion. He’s already struggling against a wolf. In his condition, there’s very little hope for him.”
She ran for the bed, ignoring those watching and grabbed Knox’s chained hand in her own. “Knox?”
A loud growl sounded from him followed by a scream filled with so much pain, she choked back tears. “Knox, please. You have to fight to stay alive. Let the animal connect with you.”
Another scream and mumble of something she didn’t understand.
“Nick, what about Zeke?” Shani asked from the back of the room. “He’s been working on something.”
“We don’t know if that would help or make things worse,” Nick told her.
Scarlett turned to Nick. “Who’s Zeke?”
“An old college friend of mine and Knox’s. He’s a scientist working on curing human diseases with shifter blood.”
Shani cleared her throat and took Nick’s arm. “Zeke mentioned the last time he came to dinner that when one of his smallest lab rats was injured by the office cat, he’d injected his newest serum into the animal and it had healed.”
“Call him!” Scarlett screamed.
“We don’t know if that would work on a human, much less one this close to death,” Nick stated.
“Don’t say that! He’s not going to die. I won’t let him,” she screamed.
Shani’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry, Scarlett.”
“Call him, Nick. Please,” she cried, wiping angry tears from her cheeks. “Call him or I swear I’ll scour this city until I find him.”
Nick growled. “Fine. But I make no promises.”
* * *
By the time Zeke showed up, almost an hour later, Knox was barely hanging on. The screams had subsided. She’d covered his injuries with ointment and gauze bandages. It made her feel she was helping somehow.
“Holy Toledo, what the hell happened exactly?” Zeke, a scrawny guy with giant Coke bottle glasses asked. He wore a Hans Solo T-shirt with a pair of black jeans a size too large.
“He was attacked by a wolf shifter,” Nick growled. “I already told you this.”
Zeke raised his hands and opened his briefcase on the dresser. “I don’t know how much help this will be, Nick. He looks half-dead already.”
He pulled out four vials and syringes. He filled each with one of the vial solutions and then headed for the bed. He glanced at the guards. “You need to hold him down.”
“He’s chained up,” one of the guards said.
Zeke glared. “Did I stutter?”
Four guys held Knox’s limbs as he injected him with each of the four needles.
Scarlett gulped back the knot in her throat. Sh
e’d given up on crying. That shit wasn’t helping Knox. She needed answers. “Now what?”
“Now, we wait,” Zeke replied.
“What did you give him?” she asked.
“A cocktail of things. Basically, if he comes back after all that, he’ll be really different.”
“Different how?” Nick asked.
“I’ve been testing a new drug that gives my specimens the same strength as a shifter, without the animal. I gave him that. I also gave him adrenaline to wake the wolf if he’s in there or speed his heart rate to get some kind of reaction from him.” He put the vials away along with the needles. “I gave him something that will help regenerate his wounds, if he can get his mind to focus on them it.”
“And the last one, what was it?” Shani asked.
Zeke took his glasses off and started wiping them. “A cocktail of alpha shifter DNA I replicated.”
“You can’t make an alpha,” Nick argued.
Zeke shrugged. “Try telling that to my experiments. We’ll find out soon enough if I can or not. I discovered that alpha shifters have a higher recuperation speed. More strength. And bigger bodies than all other shifters of their kind.”
Scarlett glanced at Knox. He wasn’t moving, and for all she knew, he had moments left. “What alpha shifters did you replicate?”
Zeke grinned. “A few of the top ones. If this works the way it’s supposed to, he’ll either be a multi-shifter or one of the animals will take control and lay claim on his body.”
Scarlett gasped. “When will we know if it’s working?”
Zeke raised his slim shoulders. “In the lab, sometimes it took days, other times moments before I saw results. I’m doing something I’ve never done. I have no idea what’s going to happen.”
Nick sighed. “Okay. We’ll keep him guarded at all times.” He turned to Shani. “You should go home. Get some rest.”
She nodded. “Mom’s with the kids, but I do want to check on them.”
“Hey, is there anything to eat in this place?” Zeke asked. “I had to leave my lab before I got a chance to eat dinner.”
“Yeah. Come with me. I’ll take you to the kitchen,” Nick said. “Let’s go, love,” he told Shani.
Shani gave Scarlett a hug. “Have faith. He’ll be okay.”
Scarlett squeezed her hand. She turned to the bed and pulled up the closest chair and sat, watching Knox for any change. People filed out of the room. The two guards in the room with her glanced at each other.
She said, “You can wait outside.”
“It’s probably best if we stay here,” one of the men replied.
She bared her teeth at him. “I can take care of myself. Wait outside.”
The guys walked out behind the others. Finally, she was alone with Knox in the bedroom. One of the many bedrooms in what she now knew was his mansion. The party had quickly come to an end once he’d been attacked. Everyone had been sent home, but no one knew why.
She gazed at his features. Knox. This was why she hadn’t wanted to bite him. What the hell was he doing in the forest? Whom was he with?
She swallowed hard at the lump in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have left, but I didn’t want to hurt you.” She pushed away the urge to cry. He didn’t need that. She had to be strong. For him. “I’ve never wanted a man the way I do you. Earlier tonight, I almost lost control of my lioness.” She pulled the chair closer until she was right next to the bed, able to touch his unmoving hand. “I wish I could go back and stay.”
Fuck. This was some bullshit. She dropped her head on her hand covering his. If he died―no, he wouldn’t die. He couldn’t. Her lioness rejected the idea. He was hers. Knox was a genius in investment banking, but she knew there was a lot more to him than that. She wanted to get to know the rest of him.
“What am I going to do?” she whispered.
A soft grunt replied. She jerked up in her seat and glanced at him. Her jaw fell open as she watched his body transform. His already tight abs became more defined. His arms and shoulder muscles bulked. His hair grew and so did a beard.
She glanced down, tugging at the bandage she’d put on his deep chest wounds. They were gone. He was once again smooth and muscular. A lot more muscular than before. Flinging off the blanket covering his legs, she watched them grow big and powerful.
Oh, hell. Her gaze strayed to his groin. That had to be some kind of joke. There was no fucking way his cock was growing before her very eyes and he wasn’t even conscious.
“Fuck!”
NINE
Knox’s body was on fire. A wolf paced inside his mind, hungry for something. He inhaled and knew then what he was hungry for. The animal bonded with him. There was a strange ability to communicate. Somehow, they both wanted the same thing. Her.
He opened his eyes and followed the delicious scent of his woman. “Mine.”
She jumped to her feet and rushed back, away from him. He didn’t know why, but her actions excited him. “Knox?”
He tugged at the bonds and wondered why he was chained up. The last thing he remembered was standing outside the bedroom after she left. He frowned. A piece of his memory was missing.
“You smell so fucking good, Scarlett. Let me taste you,” he growled.
He growled? He’d never growled in his life. That had to be the animal in him. The wolf told him that yes, it was him giving life to new characteristics in Knox. The first was his need to mate Scarlett. The second was his desire to get her naked and under him. Next was the dominance trying to assert itself as he tugged on the chains. They squeaked as he pulled.
Her eyes widened. “Knox, stop it. You need to get checked out.”
He yanked again. His cock hurt. He wanted Scarlett so fucking bad. “You can check me out, beautiful. I’ve got something that hurts just for you, baby.”
“Really, Knox?”
He took in her sexy scent and pulled harder. The chains popped off the wall. He jumped to the middle of the bed. He’d never felt so fucking alive in his life. Everything looked better, brighter. Shit, but her smell. “Take that off or I’m ripping it off you.”
She licked her lips. The scent of her arousal drove the wolf inside him insane. “Cut it out!”
He tugged off the bandage on his arm and glanced at his hands. They slowly shifted into massive wolf paws. Holy fuck. This was better than anything he’d ever expected. Humanity had never been a question to him, but he’d known as a human, it would be impossible to get a girl like Scarlett. She was strong and he wasn’t. The fact she let him fuck her told him she didn’t care how much of a human he was, but she’d been afraid to hurt him.
“I’m so fucking hard for you, baby.”
She gulped and glanced at his rock hard erection. “Oh, boy.”
“You ready for me to fuck you into the next room, Scarlett? I know that’s exactly what you want.”
“Nick!” she screamed. “He’s up! I mean, awake.”
In ten seconds flat, the room was full of people. Nick, Zeke, and four guards rushed in.
“Whoa!” Zeke yelled. “Let me get a look at him.” He pulled out a stethoscope, flashlight, and syringe. He stepped next to Scarlett and Knox growled.
“If you value your life, move away from her,” Knox told Zeke.
Zeke frowned, glanced at Scarlett and then nodded. “All righty then.”
He walked around to the other side of the bed. “Knox, you remember me?”
He nodded. Images of college and living in a dorm with Nick and Zeke flooded his mind. Sights, sounds, and smells crowded his brain as he tried to remember their past. “Zeke Redell.”
Zeke grinned. “That’s right. I just need to listen to your heart and get some blood, my friend.”
Knox glanced at Nick. His best friend was staring at him intently. His wolf didn’t like the lion in Nick. So far, the animal hadn’t posed any issues, but Nick was still his best friend. This could be a problem.
“You have
to show him you’re in control,” Nick said. “You control the wolf, not the other way around.”
“That’s right,” Zeke agreed. “Start now, or you’ll never get the animal to do what you say.”
“He doesn’t scent like a regular wolf shifter,” Nick told Zeke. “Why?”
Zeke stabbed a needle into Knox’s arm and started drawing blood. “He’s been injected with enough different drugs to mess with anyone’s scent. He’ll need a few days before you know what he will smell like.”
“How do you feel, Knox?” Nick asked, worry evident in his voice. His fear carried to Knox’s side of the room.
“I don’t know. I was in a world of pain and suddenly I had this wolf telling me to wake the fuck up.”
Zeke nodded and finished drawing blood. “That’s what I was hoping for. What else?”
“I feel like I should be jumping off the roof or running in the forest.”
“That’s the adrenaline I gave you,” Zeke said. “I needed to make sure your heart sped up so you wouldn’t go into a coma or die.”
“What else do you feel?” Scarlett asked.
Knox met her gaze and held it. “I feel like these people need to go and you need to stay.”
TEN
Scarlett could have creamed her underwear at that moment. The way Knox told her he wanted everyone gone sounded so dominant, she had a hard time keeping herself from getting wet.
“Sex really isn’t advisable at this time,” Zeke said, glancing back and forth between her and Knox. “We don’t know what else will happen with him.”
“Knox,” Nick started, “you’ve been through a lot, but you’ve also had a lot done to you. We don’t know what side effects the drugs Zeke used on you will have.”
Knox finally glanced away from her and nodded at Nick. “What do you want me to do?”
“We need to keep you under observation. I know it’s not ideal, but we have to,” Nick told him. “I can put guards on you, or you can stay here and make it easier for them and us.”
